Oops, I forgot to mention....

 
Most people can quote you an Estate Agent horror story given the opportunity, but on behalf of Estate Agents everywhere now and again I have the urge to redress the balance and highlight that we do encounter some pretty rum behaviour from clients too.
 
The ones that really frustrate me are when individuals appear to give no thought to other parties involved at all. Generally such instances seem to revolve around money and it’s interesting to see at what level peoples principals waiver. When the money is minimal it is obviously  most disappointing. I’d like to say it happens on very rare occasions, but in reality it’s much more than you may imagine. In the last fortnight alone we have had two shocking cases, both on properties we had let.

Firstly the property where we’d found a tenant and agreed moving dates etc only to hear from the landlord by email that they were pulling out. This was timed at almost midnight the night before the tenant and family were due to move in and was because they had agreed a let privately. As a result, they wouldn’t be letting our tenants move in, meaning they were then left completely high and dry with nowhere to live.
 
Secondly, there’s landlord who managed to forgot to tell us that between the viewing day and the day the tenant was moving in, that the property had been repossessed. The tenant discovered this upon arrival at the property, armed with their worldly possessions and a set of keys ready to move in. Once again he was left high, dry and homeless.
 
You can imagine that both scenarios required my staff to manage extremely difficult situations and client feedback as let down clients understandably vented their frustration on the only people they really could, even though they knew there was nothing we could have done to alter it. So for all Estate Agents faults and I know there are plenty, it is worth a reminder to all that we do deal with more stressful scenarios than many careers require and we are in a minority of almost one for businesses that can do a job correctly, be let down by the client and earn nothing for the effort.

I don’t moan about our lot often, but this week it was therapeutic to get it off my chest.